Lime Lentils with Sugar Snap Peas is a delicious healthy side dish made in less than 30 minutes. These make a fantastic dish to serve with chicken or to have on the holiday dinner table. Recipe uses 2 cups dry lentils and 1 1/2 cups fresh sugar snap peas.

I first made these Lime Lentils during the Summer when we were in peak Sugar Snap Pea season. I loved how easy they were to make. I loved how economical the dish was (dry lentils are cheap!). I loved how fresh the dish tasted due to the crunch of the peas. A few months later it’s still one of our favorite side dishes.

You’ll need 1 1/2 cups sugar snap peas. The fresher the better. These were just picked from the garden.

SOFT and EASY PUMPKIN SOURDOUGH Dinner Rolls! This homemade recipe is quick and easy and doesn’t need a bread machine! These Fall rolls are so fluffy and perfect to serve at Thanksgiving. My family loves these rolls and always requests them!

If you follow me on social media you might know I have a thing about baking bread. This Summer I started to get into it, especially Sourdough bread. I keep my Sourdough Starter in the fridge, bringing it out weekly to feed and bake something delicious. With so many garden pumpkins I wanted to mix it into a bread recipe so I came up with these extra delicious and soft Pumpkin Sourdough Dinner Rolls.

Warning: You will not be able to eat just 1 roll. Probably not 2 rolls. They are so delicious you’ll want to eat them all!

INSTANT Mashed Potatoes Cheesy Broccoli Casserole is a comfort food recipe that will have your entire family begging for more! It uses Instant Mashed Potatoes so it’s easy to make. It’s the perfect side dish for the holidays because it’s cheesy and delicious and only takes 5 minutes to prepare, 25 minutes to bake.

Before we know it the holidays will be here and we’ll be planning our dinner menu with friends and family. I wanted to share with you one of my favorite holiday casserole dishes that I think you’ll like because it’s super easy to make and is pure comfort food. The casserole only has 4 ingredients: mashed potatoes, broccoli, cheese and crackers. Who doesn’t love those ingredients? I was serious when I said this was comfort food. It only takes 5 minutes to prepare, 25 minutes to bake. What you’re left with is a cheesy delicious casserole that will make everyone at the dinner table happy, including you because it hardly took any work to make!

The dish is easy to make as it’s just 4 level steps. First you spread out the mashed potatoes. Next comes the broccoli on top. Then sprinkle your cheese. Finally, add your crumbled up crackers.

I didn’t plan on posting 2 tomatillorecipes this week but when you have a 10 pound basket full of tomatillos staring at you from the kitchen counter you might be persuaded. It finally feels like Fall in NYC and I wanted to use the tomatillos in a Fall recipe instead of the usual salsa I make. Whenever I think of tomatillos my mind always goes to soup so I decided to follow this path and come up with a Mexican inspired soup that uses tomatilos, as well as other garden fresh veggies: black beans, tomatoes, onion, jalapeno and corn. This tomatillo soup tastes delicious and has a deep flavor due to the vegetables and spices. It’s a comforting soup but doesn’t feel heavy like many other Fall soups. I suggest serving this alongside some rolls or biscuits for dipping.

It warms my heart (literally) to see so many of the vegetables we grew in this soup. The stars of this soup are the tomatillos which are filled with tasty juices that are going to be released in the slow cooker.

The other personal star in this soup are the black beans. Last year we started growing our own dry beans and since then I’ve been hooked. We grow a few different dry beans during the Summer so we can enjoy them in the Fall and Winter. This recipe calls for 1 cup dry black beans but if you don’t have the time to soak them you can also use 1 can of black beans.

I am loving this 5 minute burrito bowl right now because it’s quick, filling, delicious and uses fresh vegetables from our garden. It’s perfect for lunch (at home or take to work) because it’s so fast to make. I like preparing 2-3 bowls worth of ingredients in the beginning of the week, so I can just throw everything in a container, head to work and then microwave it once it’s lunch time. If you’re craving a quick Burrito Bowl for dinner, this is the recipe for you too! You could even add some extra protein to it, such as chicken or more beans.

There’s something romantic about tomato soup isn’t there? Maybe it reminds you of curling up with a warm bowl in Fall and Winter. Maybe it gives you memories of Mom opening a can of it as a kid. Or maybe you associate it with with the peak of garden season when you’re picking tomatoes by the basket. For me, it’s all 3 of these. Tomato soup is a favorite of mine, it’s one of those dishes that when you see on a menu you immediately know what you’re ordering. But the best tomato soup is homemade. It’s made with fresh tomatoes (preferably Roma/plum tomatoes), onions and a little bit of heavy cream with bread served on the side for dipping.

The first step to making homemade tomato soup is getting the tomatoes peeled and diced. If you’ve never made tomato soup from scratch, don’t worry, this is easy. Cut a small X in the stem end of each tomato. Drop the tomatoes into the boiling water and blanch them for about 1 minute. Using a slotted spoon, transfer them to a pot of cold water to cool. When cool enough to handle, remove and discard the skin from the tomatoes (you can use tomato skins to make tomato powder!), remove the core, and coarsely chop the flesh.

These Italian Diced Tomatoes are marinated overnight with spices for full flavor. Unlike other diced tomato recipes no boiling, water bath or peeling is needed! Bonus how to make tomato paste below the recipe!

Let me welcome you to tomato week! If you didn’t see in last week’s garden video it’s raining tomatoes for us in New York so I’ve been spending lots of quality time with our lovely tomatoes in the kitchen! Today I’m going to show you these Marinated Overnight Italian Diced Tomatoes which are easy and delicious! Tomorrow is all about creamy tomato soup! Later this week I’m giving you a quick tomato/rice dish that is perfect for taking to work for lunch! And finally I’m going to pick tomatoes, lots of them, and show you many photos of them like any proud tomato Mother would. So let’s jump in to tomato week!

We use diced tomatoes frequently in recipes so I like to always have some on hand. Last year I only made a few homemade batches but we went through them quickly so this year I was determined to make at least twice the number of batches to freeze. There’s 2 ways to go about making diced tomatoes, there’s the longer process of boiling and removing the peels (which is delicious but it takes time), or there’s this way whith is also delicious but is quick! We are picking at least 50 pounds of tomatoes a week right now so I need to be careful of time, or I’ll have to quit my job because preserving vegetables can sometimes be a full time job! In this recipe, all you have to do is cut them up, marinate them over night in the refrigerator and then cook for 30 minutes. You can also duplicate this recipe as many times as you need per how many tomatoes you are picking. For example the recipe calls for 5 tomatoes but I quintupled it because I had so many tomatoes!

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Home Chef. All opinions are 100% mine.

Delicious Truffled Three Cheese Flatbread with grape tomatoes and arugula! Ready in under 15 minutes! Only 650 calories per serving!

Matthew is back to school this week. No, not as a student, but he teaches classes at FIT and SVA in NYC. Not to brag as a proud wife, but he’s a awesome teacher. I know this because I see the looks the students give him at end of the year shows, and the followup emails that last for years after the students leave his class. Earlier this week after back to back classes that wouldn’t bring it home until 10PM, I wanted to make a dinner that I knew that he would love. So I made him these Truffled Three Cheese Flatbread which can also be described as white pizza (no tomato sauce). It was a big hit! He loved it!

This Mexican Vegetarian Lasagna Bake is filled with veggies, noodles, ricotta and mozzarella cheese! Taco seasoning gives it a delicious Mexican flavor! This healthy meal recipe is easy to make and can be prepared ahead of time for a quick weeknight meal, all you have to do is bake it!

We are loving this dish right now in our house because it’s easy to make and filled with garden fresh veggies and comforting cheese. Many times I’ll prepare this lasagna earlier in the day so all I have to do is turn on the oven and throw it in when it’s dinner time. Whenever I make this I text Matthew a photo of the lasagna and he’ll text back hearts and swoony faces. Back-to- school season is one of the busiest times of the year, and families are on the lookout for easy meals that deliver big on flavor. This is a lasagna that the family will fall in love with.

This lasagna is filled with veggies that go perfect with the “Mexican” flavor. Most vegetarian lasagna recipes use eggplant and zucchini but I don’t . Why? That’s easy. We don’t grow those vegetables, hah. Case closed. Instead I use the veggies that are grown in our garden to make this as fresh as possible. There’s kale, tomatoes, green pepper, jalapeno pepper, onion and black beans stacked inside 3 layers of lasagna noodles, alongside ricotta and mozzarella cheese.

Arugula Refried Bean Burrito is a healthy Summer meal made with canned refried beans and fresh arugula. Dinner is made in 5 minutes!

Can you feel that Summer is here? I sure can. With the temperatures rising, the last thing I want to do is eat hot food. Even worse, I definitely don’t want to turn on my stove! These fresh burritos are full of vegetables and will cool you down. They’re perfect to take already made to work, or you can take all the supplies to the park for a picnic with friends and let everyone make their own.

You’ll need 4 flour tortillas. I found these low calorie (60) sundried tomato and basil tortillas in the grocery store that I love. My favorite canned beans are Goya (especially the Rancheros) and Rosarita. You can eat these directly from the can, or you can heat them in the microwave for 1 minute. If you’re going for homemade check out my Refried Black Beans recipe!

Thank you Success® Rice for sponsoring this post. Check out Success® Rice, the ultimate mealtime staple for busy back-to-school schedules.

Buttered Cabbage and Rice is a comfort food recipe that only takes 20 minutes from start to finish! It’s a great back to school dinner recipe!

This is a easy comforting meal filled with vegetables from the garden that I hope you’ll love as much as I do. Right now kids are going back to school, creating havoc on the Fall schedule. There’s school, sports, activities, homework and there’s also you! Don’t forget to take care of you! I wanted to create a recipe that would be ready in 20 minutes that is still wholesome with fresh ingredients – a meal you’ll feel good about serving the family. Enjoy!

The main vegetables in this recipe are cabbage and peas, 2 things that we have in abundance right now in the garden. I’ve always liked cabbage, but this Summer I turned into a real cabbage lover. I can’t get enough of it, especially sauteed and buttered! Yum. Our sugar snap peas are coming to a end this season, what’s left is those monster peas that are busting through the pods. The recipe calls for 1/2 peas so you can either use frozen peas (cook them first) or you can shell fresh peas. Use whatever you hand on hand and is easiest.

This Green Bean, Cabbage and Cheese casserole is just like Macaroni and Cheese but without the pasta! It’s a savory, comforting, cheesy dish that uses fresh vegetables. Your family will love it!

With pounds of green beans and cabbage to be picked in the garden I have been trying to come up with new ways to eat our veggies. For dinner one night I was craving macaroni and cheese but wanted to use our vegetables so this unique macaroni and cheese but without the pasta casserole dish was created!

This recipe uses 1.5 cups of fresh green beans, one head of cabbage and cheddar cheese. It’s a great side dish or main dish that is comforting, but doesn’t make you feel too bad because look at all the vegetables you ate! 🙂 This would make a great new casserole dish for the holidays, as well as a everyday dinner when you have lots of green beans and cabbage. We are big fans of this dish in our house and I hope you will become one too!

Crustless Broccoli Cheese Quiche is a easy dinner recipe your family is going to love. Instead of the traditional pie crust, you use kale to line the bottom of the casserole dish. Sprinkled mozzarella cheese on top makes it extremely cheesy! It’s the perfect way to sneak in veggies!

“This is one of the best meals you ever made” said my husband Matthew eating this quiche while eyeing up the last piece in the casserole dish. I thought I’d post this first because if my meat loving husband can fall in love with this Broccoli Quiche made on top of kale leaves, then I think that’s the only review I need!

This quiche is filled with broccoli and kale. The broccoli is the main contents of the quiche while the kale acts as the pie crust. I was really craving a quiche but I didn’t have any pie crust and I wasn’t in the mood to make a homemade one so the sudden idea of using kale leaves to lie in the bottom of the casserole dish as a crust popped into my mind. I have to say this might be one of my most genius kitchen ideas to date because it worked beautifully. The kale turns a bit crusty while holding in all the contents of the quiche. I was worried that the wet ingredients would fall through the kale leaves but this quiche is not wet or soggy at all. The eggs bake perfectly. The cheese melts perfectly. When cutting it into slices it all holds together perfectly just like if you used a pie crust, but you didn’t and you saved yourself some calories.

Healthy Kale Arugula Sandwich with Melted Cheese that is only 250 calories! This delicious open faced sandwich is perfect for lunch or a meatless dinner.

With so much kale growing in the garden right now, we’ve been picking pounds worth every weekend to bring back to the city and wonder the frequently asked Summer question “What are we going to make with it?”. Kale pesto is a favorite, as is Potatoes and Kale, but I wanted to start to bring the kale into my lunch so I quickly created this Melted Kale Arugula Cheese Sandwich. I say quickly because it took me less than 15 minutes to make the sandwich, photograph it and eat it. Since you’ll only have to worry about Step 1 and Step 3, this sandwich will take you 5 minutes.

First, start out with some delicious kale and arugula. Our kale comes straight from our very green at the moment garden.

Simple Vegetarian Collard Greens recipe. These greens are simmered in a brown sugar vegetable broth making them full of flavor!

With lots of greens to pick in the garden we are having a side dish of collard greens weekly at the dinner table. I love these collards so much I’ve been making a big batch to take to work to eat for lunch a few times a week (partnered with some cheese/crackers because I love a mismatched lunch). So many Collard Greens recipes call for chicken broth and bacon, but in this recipe I’m using vegetable broth to make it Vegetarian friendly. I’m adding a little bit of brown sugar into the vegetable broth to balance out the natural bitter flavor that collards give, but not making it too sweet.

HEALTHY, SIMPLE Roasted Tomato Salad recipe that is a perfect way to enjoy fresh Summer tomatoes! Fresh tomatoes are roasted with olive oil for 25 minutes to create a delicious salad! You can use any type of tomatoes – including cherry and heirloom!

Well we aren’t quite there yet, but we’re close. Tomato season is almost here! We put our tomato plants in the ground in the beginning of June so in the next few weeks I hope to see (and pick) all the fresh tomatoes I can dream of! To get you ready for tomato picking season, I created this yummy Roasted Tomato Salad which is perfect as an appetizer, a side dish, a snack (I eat them with a fork!) or you can throw the tomatoes on a sandwich (like grilled cheese!) or into pasta. These roasted tomatoes are super versatile and super yummy so I hope you enjoy them.

HEALTHY Creamy Bok Choy Spaghetti made with Parmesan Cheese! This is a great way to sneak in vegetables for a meal your family will love! This easy recipe only uses 1/2 cup Parmesan Cheese and takes under 15 minutes to make! Sometimes I like adding chicken to it for more protein!

The garden is filled with bok choy right now. Every week when we come home from the garden I’m carrying a few pounds of it, thinking of new recipe ideas. The words “creamy” and “bok choy” dont usually go together but this recipe was such a hit it’s become a staple in our kitchen during bok choy season.

You’ll need 12 oz of bok choy for this recipe, either from your garden or a grocery store. We grow baby bok choy (we use these seeds) in the garden and it’s a wonderful fast growing plant. Because we pick it when it’s baby sized, you just yank out the entire plant. I love baby bok choy so we have planted over 90 plants – crazy, I know! If you end up with lots of bok choy plants at once, don’t worry, it freezes really well!

A bonus of this recipe is that even though it’s “creamy” it’s a pretty healthy dish. I only had to add 1/2 cup of Parmesan cheese to create a nice creamy consistency. That’s the only cheese you need which is pretty good considering lots of other “creamy” dishes are using cups of cheese. Also I recommend a skinny noodle, like simple spaghetti, instead of a hollow noodle (example is rigatoni) as it won’t absorb the creaminess as good.

In just 45 minutes Roast Pork & Mashed Potatoes with Molasses-Stewed Collard Greens will be ready enjoy. Your family will love this classic comforting meal!

This meal reminds me of my childhood on a Sunday. Sunday dinners were always the most comforting since Mom or Dad had time to relax and take their time in the kitchen. One of the most popular Sunday meals were pork, mashed potatoes and a vegetable side – my brother loved this! Now fast forward 25 years and I still love making a classic dish for my family to enjoy. I made this for Matthew a few days ago and he fell in love with it!

Do you guys know about Blue Apron? If you live in a city you might have seen the blue boxes being delivered to your neighbors. Blue Apron is a home delivery food service who’s mission is to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone. All you do is sign up for the service, tell them how many meals you want a week, tell them any preferences (vegetarian for example) and then your high quality ingredients will be shipped to you, along with a recipe card for you to create at home. I love this service and I love reading their Facebook page with so many fans saying how now they make home cooked meals during the week instead of take out. If you want to try Blue Apron, here’s a coupon for $20 off.

Blue Apron approaches most recipes as if you don’t have anything in your kitchen. They send you all the main ingredients, as well as knick-knack ingredients such as molasses, sugar, butter, seasonings, etc. For this Roasted Pork recipe, you can see below they sent me every single ingredient. Also I want to praise how beautiful the Collards were and how fresh all the produce was too.

EASY SLOW COOKER black beans made with dried beans! This healthy, vegetarian recipe cooked in the crock pot for 4 hours is so easy and healthy! Because it uses dried beans it’s cheap to make too! We love serving these beans on flour tortillas for black bean tacos! It’s one of my families favorite comfort foods!

I’m guilty of it. Yup, the big sin. What’s that you ask? Oh, it’s shameful. Sometimes I buy…. canned black beans. What’s my excuse? They’re so easy, all I have to do is take the lid off, heat them up and they’re ready to go. And yet, that bag of dried black beans sits on the bottom shelf (always) at the grocery store, for half the price and twice the amount and I always look at it for forgiveness “Dry black beans, I’m so sorry, I just don’t have time, I’m so so so sorry”. Then I throw the canned beans in my cart and run out of the aisle before the dried black beans can look at me again.

Once I started growing our own black beans, I started to see the beauty of dried beans. The only thing that was holding me back 100% from joining the dried bean team was the overnight soaking, which I almost always can never remember to do (we aren’t a house that plans our meals in advance). So I came up with this recipe of throwing them in the slow cooker for 4 hours which leads to a yummy bean perfection!

Delicious Vegetarian Chili made in 45 minutes that even meat eaters will love!

Last (last) weekend we had some pretty amazing canned chili for lunch on the land. The chili was filling, tasty with great spices and had that very important texture that ground meat gives in dishes. The thing is though, this was vegetarian chili. After I exclaimed for the 20th time how great this chili was (everyone agreed – vegetarians and meat eaters) I then made it my goal to make similar style homemade chili. This 45 Minute Vegetarian Chili recipe was born!

(By the way – Caroline’s is the best canned Vegetarian chili ever. If you need some cans to take camping or to stock up your pantry, definietely try it!)

The chili is made up vegetables: tomatoes, bell pepper, corn, carrot, jalapeno and diced green chilies. Now comes the beans: black and kidney beans. There’s plenty of spices: garlic, bay leaf, cumin, oregano, chili powder salt and pepper. We’re going to give it that texture that ground meat gives it with meatless crumbles. If you’re a meat eater and you’re thinking “yuck” you better check yourself because these are good (I promise!). It has the same texture consistency of meat while being tasty. I recommend using Neat or Morningstar brands for crumbles. Matthew (husband) is a meat and potatoes guy. His dream meal is a pot roast with mashed potatoes and he even says how good this recipe is, so you can trust me (and him).